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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Although the character of Annie Allen, whose first years this poem chronicles, will grow as an adult to grapple with loneliness, poverty, death, and segregation, the poem offers the child as a symbol of raw energy and pure possibility, a child who is “[b]lurred and stupendous. Wanted and unexpected” (Line 2). The poem works on the distance between what we understand and what the child realizes. For now, the child apparently seems oblivious to its racial or gender or economic identities.
The baby, apparently unexpected but still loved, symbolizes brash reckless exploration. The opening stanza records the grasping eye typical of a newborn dazzled by a world outside themselves. Without pattern (that would impose a very adult sort of logic), the first stanza moves about the furnishings of the home, showing the child’s fascination with things. In the second stanza, the child indulges the reach of the unfettered imagination that allows, for a time, the world not to be limited by what it is. In this, Brooks’s child symbolizes hope, a principle of optimism and expectation that will perhaps someday curve into disappointment and regret. All too soon, the child must settle into a grown-up world of outhouses and discarded jelly jars.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
Gwendolyn Brooks
A Sunset of the City
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Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
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Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The Blackstone Rangers
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The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
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The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
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the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
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We Real Cool
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